"There's nothing to shout about. I was young and stupid, in love for the first time in my life. I was itching to get everything: money, a home, and a family, and a first-born son," says Mirek smilingly. What's so special about all this, you may ask. Precisely so: boredom, grindstone, a spineless wimp with no imagination. So it's high time we gave you the readers a breather from this "hopeless vision".
United by love and money
We are going to skip who they were and what they did, Mirek and Aneta, when they met, because there was nothing special about it. Suffice it to say that they were both besotted with each other, they moved in several months before their planned wedding, they had a pair of budgerigars and — this is key to the story — a special bank account to save for the home of their dreams. The event that turned their mundane reality upside down came one sunny morning 19 years ago when they both went to Aneta's home town to tell her family that they were doing really well in the capital city of Lower Silesia.
"I used to drive a Polonez those days, even though I could afford something better. One day, as I was paying for petrol, I bought a scratch card. The card was worth 25 thousand PLN," recounts Mirek.
Although he did not want to boast about the win, nor about the money he and Aneta saved in their shared account, she could not help but tell her family all about it as she drank too much during family dinner. He failed to notice — because as he said he was upset with his future wife — that her brother-in-law started paying court to her. Later he would come to visit them in Wroclaw, either on business or with a sweet treat from the mother. Anyway, the final of the story was that that when, five months later, Mirek came home from a three-day business trip, he realised that the clothes of his beloved were missing from the wardrobe and that their account showed only 5 zł and 20 gr, which was about 45 thousand less than it should have been.
Bella Italia!
Let us keep Mirek's emotional and legal hardship a secret. We will not be going on about people who, when in adversity, buckle down and do something bad to their lives. All we can share is that the unlucky guy needed several years to recover from the blow.
"In 2002, I went on holiday with my friends to Italy. As I went for a stroll one evening I was nearly trampled upon by a staggering drunk man. Initially, I wanted to beat him up," he reminisces. Maybe it is for the better that he failed to do so because Mirek is no wimp and could seriously hurt the drunken rogue and lose a lot of money as a result. Roughly speaking, 53 000 EUR.
Forgive, sucker!
Now it is high time we focused on the staggering guy. It soon turned out that he was Polish (sadly, that's no surprise). On top of this, it was Mirek's old acquaintance, Aneta's brother-in-law.
Aneta's sister had no easy life with her husband. "He was a typical womaniser," says Mirek. "And later on it turned out that he also stole somebody else's fiancée and their money," he adds. There are more things in heaven and earth that may be dreamt of in philosophy, so we are quite willing to believe that the savvy brother-in-law talked Aneta into ditching her fiancé. The rest of this stormy romance proves simply "fascinating". We can only share what we know because Mirek has not grasped everything yet, either with his knowledge or — these are his own words — with his mind.
As soon as Aneta, out of the blue, lost her mind for her brother-in-law, they both decided to disappear. And they left as far as possible from their family. He took to exchanging the money into foreign currency. No one really knows what they did before they ended up in the Netherlands. What Mirek knows from the account of his tipsy "brother-in-law" is that: "this tart took me to a casino, and I [blip] went broke. And she met a bronzed guy and left me with all this [blip]". In order to compensate for all his wrongdoing ("cos you're an innocent sucker"), the brother-in-law gave him a mangled 10 EUR note and said aptly: "That's all I've got, but I won't forget about you as we were both duped by this [blip]". Mirek laughs out loud whenever he recounts the meeting. "He yanked at my shirt and insisted that I took the money, and so I did, just to fob him off. And I spent it in the nearest bar to buy a SuperEnalotto voucher [Italian lottery whose prizes run to hundreds of millions EUR]," says Mirosław Dumny.
Epilogue
Approx. 53 000 EUR, that's how much money Mirek brought from his holiday in Italy. Next year he would move to Upper Austria, to his wife's house. What we know for sure is that her name is not Aneta.
Names and surnames used in the text are fictitious.
